Tag Archives: Fiction

Review | The Infernal Republic, Marshall Moore

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Marshall Moore’s short story collection The Infernal Republic is darkly comic, at times downright disturbing, yet in some ways also strangely endearing. Moore’s stories feature characters who, for some reason or other, are alienated from their community, and therefore voice desires that we may censor ourselves from even contemplating. Yet at the root of even the most twisted desires is usually the almost desperate need to connect. Moore’s stories are intense and, when he resists the urge to throw in a surprise twist at the end and just allows the situation to play itself out, his stories are powerful.

Take for example “The Infinite Monkey Theorem,” which attracted me to this collection in the first place. Yahweh and Lucifer have placed bets on the idea that ten thousand monkeys with typewriters will, given an infinite amount of time, be able to re-create the complete works of Shakespeare. The story’s protagonist is Beëlphazoar, a demon tasked with supervising the monkeys and the team of demon guards. I love the concept — it’s absolutely ludicrous! — and Moore amps up the absurdity throughout. For the few thousand years, Beëlphazoar is so bored by his job that he teaches himself Mandarin, then Cantonese and other Chinese dialects. The demons get so desperate they beg Beëlphazoar to count “Some1” and “saxifrage” as words. “This isn’t Scrabble,” Beëlphazoar argues, but even he is soon desperate enough to consider cheating. As his fellow demon Nabob points out, “Boredom is death when you can’t die.”

The story itself kept me laughing throughout, but beneath the humour is the utter despair of all these demons stuck with a thankless, ultimately pointless job for all eternity. If you’re fortunate enough to have never felt that way about your job, watch Office Space. Beyond that is the relationship between Yahweh and Lucifer. Beëlphazoar describes the rift between Yahweh and Lucifer as a “vicious divorce,” and I was struck at the depth of emotion suggested by that term — one deity the spurned party, longing to rekindle the relationship, and the other unwilling to take him back. So when one party looks “crestfallen” at the outcome of the bet and Beëlphazoar suddenly understands what was at stake, I just love all the emotion seething just beneath the lines.

Much darker and angrier than “Infinite Monkey” is “Town of Thorns,” possibly my favourite in the collection. The story is almost painful to read — Michael was the victim of a hate crime and deals with the experience by getting tattoos, which alienates his partner Wade. “The heartbreaks, like the gods, are in the details,” Wade thinks. Michael has changed so much of his physical appearance that the only thing that remains unchanged are his sexual organs. “Why are you looking at my dick like that?” Michael asks, and Wade thinks but is unable to say aloud, “Because I miss the guy it’s attached to.” Just as Michael is having difficulty dealing with the violence to which he’d been subjected (which the cops claim is a matter of bad luck rather than gay-bashing), so is Wade unable to break through the barriers Michael has put up. Michael’s hate, fuelled by pain, is almost palpable, as is Wade’s love, both his desire and his inability to help Michael move on from the experience. We want Wade and Michael to re-connect, to be as happy as they were before the crime, yet we also feel Wade’s helplessness, that maybe things have just changed too much or, worse, maybe Wade had never really known Michael at all. I love the push and pull within this story, the pushing away and the clutching on. This is probably Moore’s most serious story in the collection and, for me, the most powerful.

I also liked the story “Flesh, Blood and Some of the Parts,” about a suicidal teen in a world where children were literally indestructible. How can one kill himself if doctors can easily remove one’s arms? It’s a twisted concept, yet also thought-provoking: how far would you go to prevent someone from taking his own life? Another story has a couple of strangers bonding over a man about to jump off a ledge, while still another has the narrator running over the man he loves and wanting to make love to his injured victim. Both stories very much twisted, and the narrator of the latter story actually psychotic. Yet Moore’s writing is compelling, and while I may not sympathize with the characters, I certainly perceive their obsessive need to connect. I also loved “Still Life with Pterodactyls,” about a man who has the power to make people disappear, but is unable to control it. He is doomed to loneliness, and I love how this is downplayed by Moore’s matter-of-fact recitation of disappearances.

Some of Moore’s shorter stories — about a condo literally ejected from its building or a woman who recruits beautiful young women for supernatural beings — just fell flat for me. They felt gimmicky, and I was left at the end wondering, so what? “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” inspired by the Damien Hirst piece of the same name had potential, but also left me with the “so what?” feeling at the end.  “215,” about a house that has become self-aware and whose owners want to convert it to an apartment complex, had an interesting horror-story approach but was a bit heavy-handed with the existentialism.

Infernal Republic is an intense short story collection. Some of the works try a bit too hard to be funny or to have a surprise twist, but many others delve deep into the darkness of human desire. The stories I enjoyed in the collection are disturbing and, more importantly, compelling. The experience of reading this collection is much like the cover image suggests — it’s a wild, unpredictable ride, and like Moore’s characters, you dive deep, looking for something to break your fall.

The Infernal Republic isn’t available on Indigo, but can be purchased on Kindle and Amazon.ca.

Review | A Room Full of Bones, Elly Griffiths

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I’m always up for discovering a new mystery series, so when I heard of Elly Griffiths’ A Room Full of Bones, which features Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist who solves mysteries, I was definitely interested. In Bones, a museum curator is found dead beside a coffin thought to contain the bones of medieval Bishop Augustine. I work in an art gallery, and I’ve always been fascinated by museums and artifacts, so I was excited to see how a forensic archaeologist would use her expertise to solve this mystery.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really see much mystery-solving from Ruth Galloway in this book. Bones is the first Galloway I’ve read but the fourth book in the series, and from this Eurocrime review, I see that Galloway is usually more involved in the actual case. However, I agree with the Eurocrime reviewer that the Galloway storyline in this book focused way too much on her personal life. It’s certainly realistic — as a single mother of a one year old, I can imagine that’ll take up most of her time. As well, I bet long-time fans of the series would be pleased to see so much character development. We learn not just about Galloway as a mother, but also about her complicated relationship with the baby’s father, D.I. Harry Nelson. To be honest, I really felt for Nelson’s wife Michele, and I did enjoy the scenes where she and Nelson struggle to make their relationship work. I also liked that, while Galloway clearly loves Nelson as the father of her baby, she doesn’t seem to be in love with him. I found that an interesting twist to the usual love triangle.

Despite the focus on Galloway’s personal life, there is a pretty interesting mystery in Bones. Galloway does discover a shocking fact about the bishop from the bones, and her expertise is eventually key to solving the curator’s death. I was disappointed that these pivotal elements appeared mostly in passing and I was somewhat disappointed at the way that mystery was resolved.

That being said, there are a couple of other mysteries in Bones — another character’s death and Nelson himself contracting a mysterious disease. These are both interesting puzzles, and I love the cast of secondary characters that we get to meet. The Smith family members are particularly quirky, and I like how the they reminded me a bit of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. We have all these complex characters, each potentially with his or her own motivations to commit a crime.

A blurb at the back of the novel calls Griffiths’ books “atmospheric,” and definitely, Bones contains an element of the gothic. I like that Griffiths never really confirms whether an incident is supernatural or whether it can be explained by science. For one plot twist in particular, Galloway’s friend Cathbad, a Druid, offers a supernatural explanation and drug-induced hallucinogenic solution, yet later on, someone else gives a more prosaic, perfectly rational explanation. This ambiguity adds to the atmosphere. While I found the potentially supernatural elements odd, I never really was sucked deep enough into the story to find them genuinely creepy. Even when someone received a snake that Cathbad says was a curse, I really just thought of it as a snake, despite Griffiths’ ambiguous treatment. That being said, I did have a horrible nightmare the first night I read this book. Perhaps my subconscious was more afraid than I realized.

A Room Full of Bones is a pretty good mystery. I was expecting a bit more of the historical mystery and I would have liked to see a bit more of the forensic archaeologist side of Ruth Galloway, but her personal life does make for an interesting story. I liked learning about the relationships between the characters, and I like how Griffiths made them seem real.

Review | The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: a novel in pictures, Caroline Preston

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I love the concept behind Caroline Preston’s The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt! The “first-ever scrapbook novel,” the novel takes the form of a scrapbook Frankie keeps from her high school graduation in 1920, through her days at Vassar, her struggle to be a writer in Greenwich Village and in Paris, and finally her return home in 1927. Somewhat similar in form to Griffin and Sabine, Scrapbook contains vintage memorabilia, designed as if they had been glued to the page. Pages include amusement park tickets, graduation invitations, photos cut from fashion magazine, even a magazine ad for Palmolive soap. Unlike in Griffin and Sabine, the memorabilia in Scrapbook are only images on the page, and therefore cannot be removed, but the entire look of the page is almost three dimensional.

Have you ever kept a scrapbook? Back in 2005, right before I moved to Canada, my sister gave me a scrapbook so that I would always have a piece of the Philippines with me. I turned that book into a record of my entire life — as many pictures and memorabilia as I could cram in. My scrapbook ended up looking nowhere near as artistic as Frankie Pratt’s, but it’s definitely one of my most treasured possessions. I flip through it every once in a while, and the book transports me instantly to my past, to people and memories that mean something to me.

Scrapbook transports us to the 1920s, a fascinating era in history. Frankie, voted the “smartest girl” of her graduating class, dreams of becoming a writer and finding the love of her life. Because of her ambition to be a writer, she gets to meet some of the literary luminaries of her time, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and James Joyce. Including such significant historical figures, especially when they aren’t the subject of your story, is usually a delicate task, and it sometimes comes off as name-dropping. Preston, however pulls it off and it feels plausible. The scrapbook format also works really well, because giving each writer encounter a page or two of beautifully laid out snapshots, letters and typed lines acknowledges each encounter’s significance without either overwhelming us or trying too hard to be casual about it. Frankie’s scrapbook gives the impression that meeting James Joyce for work is as important to her as a letter she receives from a beau. I also love that Frankie is a reader. I love vintage book covers, and seeing 1920s cover art for This Side of Paradise and To the Lighthouse was just amazing. I especially love the feeling that while, for me, viewing these book covers was a trip to the past, for Frankie, these were contemporary titles, and she would have no way of knowing how significant they’d be over time.

Reading Scrapbook made me want to travel back in time to the 1920s. Well-written novels can certainly transport my imagination to the past, but the beauty of Scrapbook’s unique format is that it puts me as a reader into an interesting dual position. On one hand, I feel like a 21st century woman who happened upon an old scrapbook in an attic or a garage sale, and am viewing the significant moments in the life of someone from the past. On the other hand, I am also Frankie Pratt, viewing these things for the first time and being so excited by Beau Brummel with Mary Astor and John Barrymore that I simply must include the theatre program in my scrapbook. When I think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, I picture a heavy tome of classic literature that, because of its narrative style, is going to be a difficult read. In contrast, Frankie knows Ulysses as “the notorious banned novel!” Ulysses is the controversial novel that everyone talks about, but that is practically impossible to find. She reads it not because she wants to tackle a classic, but because it has for her the thrill of the illicit. The vintage memorabilia in the pages creates an atmosphere of magic, of passion and possibility, and I at least wished I could have been there with Frankie, experiencing all these adventures with her.

Scrapbook is also such a romantic novel! The question of whom Frankie will end up with isn’t too difficult to guess, but the relationships she forms are all so fascinating. Again, the scrapbook format enhances the romance. Images of dapper men in suits, of love letters, movie tickets and telegrams all work together to create a lush, evocative world, where a gentleman can come knocking at your door or a rogue can invite you for a spin in his brand new automobile. The scrapbook format also softens the edges of emotion. When a man breaks Frankie’s heart, we know this because of a couple of photographs and a few typed lines, over a two-page spread. Frankie has a great sense of humour, and so another painful experience is countered by a lighthearted image from a magazine ad. It is almost too easy to miss the pain behind these images, and the book forces us to stop at moments and discern all the layers of emotions revealed by Frankie’s choice of memorabilia.

I can keep going on about all the things that fascinated me in this novel, but Scrapbook is definitely better seen in person than read about. The book trailer is a bit too long, in my opinion, but it does give you an idea of how the pages in the novel look:

Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is a beautiful, beautiful book. Frankie is a charming, intelligent, utterly delightful woman, and her personality shines through on every page. I just fell in love with this book, and I hope you will too.